With the advent of e-commerce, consumers can browse through millions of products and order from anywhere on the globe if they are connected to the internet. E-commerce has made available an unprecedented number of product options to the consumer which can be viewed and ordered through a digital device from the comfort of home, office or on the go, while travelling.
Since the sellers on the internet has literally offered the customer the whole world to choose from, they have also taken over the cumbersome task of maintaining and managing a warehouse which stores the products which are being offered for sale. Even a simple product like a bathing soap may have more than 100 different variations depending upon the brand and size/weight.
There have been attempts to automate the management of stock in the warehouse but because of the enormous number of orders being placed at lightning speed via the internet and the continuous endeavour by the seller to deliver the products to the customer within the shortest possible time to the customer to outdo the competition (which includes the store next door), warehouse design and management has remained a challenge.
Warehouses are expected to frequently execute transactions which are user generated and include products from completely unrelated categories, and handle and store nearly an infinite number of products. However, these warehouses have very minimal time to process the orders with almost no margin for error.
An important aspect while designing a warehouse and storing and managing stock units in the ware house is the optimizations of the layout of the ware house so that the distance traveled by the operator/robot in the warehouse is minimized. Many researchers model this as a traveling salesman problem. Attempts have been made to reduce the order picking time based on volumes or turnover storage policies. Most frequently ordered items are placed close to the front of the picking zones. This uses historical information to determine the number of picks and other attributes. This has proven ineffective because of the ever changing markets and demands and continual launches of new products in the market.
While researchers have been concentrating on placement and location of similar and like items together based upon the historical orders, little attention has been paid to the actual design and layout of the warehouse to reduce the travel time within the warehouse irrespective of the nature of the orders and placement and location of the items in the ware house.
Therefore there is a need for a system to manage a warehouse, which reduces the pick and delivery time by reducing the total path to be traversed irrespective of the placement and location of the stock items.